How to Determine Your Needs for a Multi-Cloud Architecture

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The benefits of the public cloud are well-documented and widely accepted, but are they enough? Prospective benefits of cost savings, infrastructure scalability and ease of management drive many businesses to cash in on the public cloud. Unfortunately, these businesses often learn after the fact that a public cloud deployment isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution, which is why many high-profile companies, including Dropbox and Facebook, are pulling public cloud workloads back down to private, on-premises environments to better meet performance, security and budget requirements.

So, does this mean private is better than public? Hardly. But it does mean it’s worth it for IT leaders to consider a more flexible, multi-cloud architecture. And enterprises agree. RightScale reports that 85% of enterprises have adopted a multi-cloud strategy this year.

Launching a Multi-Cloud Architecture

Unfortunately, the “why” behind a multi-cloud approach may be clear, but the “how” can be decidedly complex. To help boil down the process for IT decision makers, we’ve developed a five-part blog series outlining an approach to launching an effective multi-cloud strategy. It’s kicked off by the first, and most important, step of all — determining needs.

Six Considerations for Determining Your Multi-Cloud Needs

1. Short- and Long-Term Business Objectives

These may include growth plans, M&A, new product launches, geographical expansions, new markets, innovation initiatives and so on, which will drive needs like scalability, latency requirements, budget planning and more.

2. Existing Infrastructure

What’s working and what’s not? What’s currently on-premises and what’s in the cloud? What trends do you see relative to performance, usage, cost, availability and so on? How many vendors do you currently have? Do you have a handle on shadow IT? What’s the current ROI on individual components of your infrastructure and the ecosystem as a whole?

3. Security and Compliance Obligations

Evaluate your current security programs and consider any future adjustments or upgrades, including for the latest cyber threats. Also, assess the current state of technical and industry-specific compliance and look to the future. What changes or new regulations are coming down the pike?

4. User Experience

Are your existing users satisfied? What is adding business value and what is dead weight? What applications do users love/hate and why? Are the right users getting the right services in the right way?

5. External Customer Experience

How can you deliver more value to customers, and faster? What customer feedback can be incorporated to improve infrastructure? How can your team adjust the backend to differentiate the business? Are they prepared to meet rapidly changing customer needs as quickly and efficiently as possible?

6. Competency with the Public Cloud

Is your staff properly trained in one or multiple public clouds — AWS, Azure and/or others — and do you have adequately trained staff to support a multi-cloud architecture?

Create a Foundation for Multi-Cloud Success

Determining business, technical and personnel requirements is the first step to successfully deploying a multi-cloud strategy — not to mention moving on to step two of the process: considering next-gen technologies.

Stay tuned for the next edition of our five-part blog series exploring the nuances of evaluating technologies for a multi-cloud architecture.

Learn Why A Multi-Cloud Data Center Architecture Is Becoming Increasingly Popular For Companies Just Like Yours

About Blair Felter

As the Marketing Director at vXchnge, Blair is responsible for managing every aspect of the growth marketing objective and inbound strategy to grow the brand. Her passion is to find the topics that generate the most conversations.